NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End

One
of the most successful and enduring feats of interplanetary exploration, NASA's
Opportunity rover mission is at an end after almost 15 years exploring the
surface of Mars and helping lay the groundwork for NASA's return to the Red
Planet.

The Opportunity
rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust storm blanketed its location in June 2018. After more
than a thousand commands to restore contact, engineers in the Space Flight
Operations Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made their last
attempt to revive Opportunity Tuesday, to no avail. The solar-powered rover's
final communication was received June 10.

Drive along with the NASA's Opportunity Mars rover and hear the voices of scientists and engineers behind the mission. Designed to run for 90 days, the exploration spanned more than 15 years from 2004 to 2019. Along the way, it discovered definitive proof of liquid water on ancient Mars and set the off-world driving record.

"It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity
that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of
Mars," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "And when that day
arrives, some portion of that first footprint will be owned by the men and
women of Opportunity, and a little rover that defied the odds and did so much
in the name of exploration."

Designed to
last just 90 Martian days and travel 1,100 yards (1,000 meters), Opportunity
vastly surpassed all expectations in its endurance, scientific value and
longevity. In addition to exceeding its life expectancy by 60 times, the rover
traveled more than 28 miles (45 kilometers) by the time it reached its most
appropriate final resting spot on Mars - Perseverance Valley.

"For
more than a decade, Opportunity has been an icon in the field of planetary
exploration, teaching us about Mars' ancient past as a wet, potentially
habitable planet, and revealing uncharted Martian landscapes," said Thomas
Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "Whatever
loss we feel now must be tempered with the knowledge that the legacy of
Opportunity continues - both on the surface of Mars with the Curiosity rover
and InSight lander - and in the clean rooms of JPL, where the upcoming Mars
2020 rover is taking shape."

Tour the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and see the Mars 2020 mission under construction. Project System Engineer Jennifer Trosper explains the hardware being built and tested, including the rover, descent stage, cruise stage, back shell and heat shield. This NASA mission is preparing to launch to the Red Planet in 2020 and land in 2012.

The final transmission,
sent via the 70-meter Mars Station antenna at NASA's Goldstone Deep Space
Complex in California, ended a multifaceted, eight-month
recovery strategy in an attempt
to compel the rover to communicate.

"We have made
every reasonable engineering effort
to try to recover Opportunity
and have determined that the likelihood
of receiving a signal is far too low to continue recovery efforts," said
John Callas, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project at JPL.

Opportunity
landed in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars on Jan. 24, 2004, seven months
after its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Its twin
rover, Spirit, landed 20 days earlier in the 103-mile-wide (166-kilometer-wide)
Gusev Crater on the other side of Mars. Spirit logged almost 5 miles (8
kilometers) before its mission wrapped up in May 2011.

From the day
Opportunity landed, a team of mission engineers, rover drivers and scientists on
Earth collaborated to overcome challenges and get the rover from one geologic site
on Mars to the next. They plotted workable avenues over rugged terrain so that
the 384-pound (174-kilogram) Martian explorer could maneuver around and, at
times, over rocks and boulders, climb gravel-strewn slopes as steep as 32-degrees
(an off-Earth record), probe crater floors, summit hills and traverse possible dry
riverbeds. Its final venture brought it to the western limb of Perseverance
Valley.

"I
cannot think of a more appropriate place for Opportunity to endure on the
surface of Mars than one called Perseverance Valley," said Michael
Watkins, director of JPL. "The records, discoveries and sheer tenacity of
this intrepid little rover is testament to the ingenuity, dedication, and
perseverance of the people who built and guided her."

More Opportunity Achievements

Set a one-day Mars driving record March 20, 2005, when it traveled
721 feet (220 meters).

Returned
more than 217,000 images, including
15 360-degree color panoramas.

Exposed
the surfaces of 52 rocks to reveal fresh mineral surfaces for analysis and
cleared 72 additional targets with a brush to prepare them for inspection with
spectrometers and a microscopic imager.

Discovered
strong indications at Endeavour Crater of the action of ancient water similar
to the drinkable water of a pond or lake on Earth.

All
of the off-roading and on-location scientific analyses were in service of the
Mars Exploration Rovers' primary objective: To seek out historical evidence of the
Red Planet's climate and water at sites where conditions may once have been
favorable for life. Because liquid water is required for life, as we know it,
Opportunity's discoveries implied that conditions at Meridiani Planum may have
been habitable for some period of time in Martian history.

"From
the get-go, Opportunity delivered on our search for evidence regarding water,"
said Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rovers' science payload at
Cornell University. "And when you combine the discoveries of Opportunity
and Spirit, they showed us that ancient Mars was a very different place from
Mars today, which is a cold, dry, desolate world. But if you look to its
ancient past, you find compelling evidence for liquid water below the surface
and liquid water at the surface."

All those
accomplishments were not without the occasional extraterrestrial impediment. In
2005 alone, Opportunity lost steering to one of its front wheels, a stuck
heater threatened to severely limit the rover's available power, and a Martian sand
ripple almost trapped
it for good. Two years later, a two-month
dust storm imperiled the rover before relenting. In 2015, Opportunity lost use
of its 256-megabyte flash memory and, in 2017, it lost steering to its other
front wheel.

Each time the
rover faced an obstacle, Opportunity's team on Earth found and implemented a solution
that enabled the rover to bounce back. However, the massive dust
storm that took shape in the
summer of 2018 proved too much for history's most senior Mars explorer.

"When
I think of Opportunity, I will recall that place on Mars where our intrepid rover
far exceeded everyone's expectations," Callas said. "But what I
suppose I'll cherish most is the impact Opportunity had on us here on Earth. It's
the accomplished exploration and phenomenal discoveries. It's the generation of
young scientists and engineers who became space explorers with this mission. It's
the public that followed along with our every step. And it's the technical
legacy of the Mars Exploration Rovers, which is carried aboard Curiosity and the
upcoming Mars 2020 mission. Farewell, Opportunity, and well done."

Mars
exploration continues unabated. NASA's InSight lander, which touched down on
Nov. 26, is just beginning its scientific investigations. The Curiosity rover has
been exploring Gale Crater for more than six years. And, NASA's Mars 2020 rover
and the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover both will launch in July 2020,
becoming the first rover missions designed to seek signs of past microbial life
on the Red Planet.

JPL managed the
Mars Exploration Rovers Opportunity and Spirit for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate in Washington. For more information about the agency's Mars
Exploration program, visit: